On Boston Harbor’s Long Island, two miles out in Quincy Bay, the Curley Building stands hulking and decrepit. In the library, books tumble in piles, blanketed with dust and mold. The Art Deco auditorium is musty and rusted; holes in the roof illuminate a floor strewn with chunks of ceiling. It’s as if the place was evacuated in a hurry sometime in the 1930s and simply left to the raccoons, one of which decomposes unbothered in a corner.

Standing on a weatherworn stage framed by faded crimson curtains, the seven members of Dropkick Murphys are arrayed in stark tableau, black clad and casting long shadows on the piles of junk behind them. They’re here to film the video for “The State of Massachusetts,” the single from their new album, The Meanest of Times (Born & Bred, released on September 18), and as tall Tim Brennan plucks a tricky Celtic melody on his banjo, they lurch into motion.

It’s a mighty noise: the sound of seven men with an elemental, effortless working dynamic.

Nearby, a bunch of kids are playing. They chase each other in the shadows near the back of the auditorium and tiptoe trepidly into the maw of the stygian tunnel beneath the stage. Outside, they paw through a box of T-shirts, and grab at the McDonald’s trucked in for lunch. Given the dark decay of the locale and the deafening noise blasting from within, one might wonder what they’re doing here.

Dropkick Murphys are not your typical punk band. They’re a Boston punk band, an Irish one, with enormous families and armies of friends. And they always roll deep. Anyone who’s been to their mammoth, multi-night Saint Patrick’s Day shows and seen the stage ringed with mothers and fathers and daughters and sons and grandparents and godparents and cousins and friends of cousins knows this.

Those kids, scowling in scally caps and clip-on ties on the cover of The Meanest of Times? A pretty safe bet they weren’t hired from Central Casting.

In fact, Casey says, sitting in an air-conditioned trailer on a break from the video shoot, the theme of the record, woven throughout those thunderous chords, is family and friends — loyalty to them and loyalty from them. It happened almost by accident. “Al and I were talking one day [and realized] 11 or 12 songs on the album deal directly or indirectly [with] family.”

Stones arrive The Garden was the scene of a historical rock experience last Saturday when the Stones came to Boston. All the past fiascos staged in the hulking home of the Bruins and the Celtics are forgotten.

Ten years of great sports Moments after Adam Vinatieri's field goal split the uprights as the clock expired in the Louisiana Superdome on February 3, 2002, the streets of Boston were in bedlam. Drunk people dangled from trees and hung off lampposts. Motorists leaned on their horns. I saw a guy hug a cop

Black + Gold go green As a kid in his native Alberta, NHL defenseman Andrew Ference was always outdoors — like a lot of Canadian kids, he loved snowboarding, skiing, and skating.

Duck season No one knows what got into Offerman — he’d never been arrested before.

83. Rod Brind'Amour Every team needs a captain, and if the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes ever let him loose, Team Ugly will be happy to have this dour, hatchet-faced hockey goon. On skates, his busted, scar-scathed visage serves as a warning of goals — or punishment — to come. Off the ice, this guy couldn’t score with a two-man advantage.

Sports Blotter: the King James version In the most highly anticipated sports trial since the Marv Albert overbite case, Gloria James, mother of burgeoning NBA media supernova LeBron James, will finally face justice for her role in what has been hands down the most interesting sports DUI of the year.

INSIDE THE TEDXDIRIGO CONFERENCE | September 14, 2011 I arrived at TEDxDirigo on September 10 feeling rather less than confident about the state of world. The tenth anniversary of 9/11 — and the awful decade that unspooled from that sky-blue morning — was on my mind.